A section from the journey

The Seven Open Hands

Below the crowned kings ruled many smaller chiefs, the velir. The bards remembered seven of them as the greatest of all givers, the Kadai Ezhu Vallal. Their fame was their generosity. One chief gave his own chariot to a flowering vine that had nothing to climb. In the Tamil south, the highest praise was not for the richest hand, but for the most open one.

We have stood in the courts of crowned kings. Now let us meet the men below them, for the Tamil land was not ruled by three kings alone. Scattered among the hills and the dry country were many local chiefs. The Tamils called them the . They held smaller lands, prized their freedom, and sometimes stood with a great king, and sometimes against him.

Among these chiefs, the bards remembered seven above all the rest. They called them the , which we may render as "the last seven great patrons." Their names were sung from court to court: Pari, Kari, Ori, Nalli, Pegan, Ay, and Adiyaman.

Now here is the surprising thing. These seven were not remembered chiefly for battles won or lands taken. They were remembered for giving. To grasp why, we must understand how a poet lived. The Tamil bards owned little. They walked from one hall to the next, singing praise, and they lived on what a generous patron placed in their hands. A great giver fed the very voices that carried his name down the years.

So generosity became the highest virtue of this world. The Tamils had a word for it: , open-handed giving. To give freely, even past good sense, was the mark of a noble soul. And the opposite, to hoard and to grudge, was the deepest disgrace a great person could wear. Hold that word, kodai. It is one of the keys to the Tamil heart.

The most loved story is of the chief Pari. One day, the poets say, Pari was riding out when he saw a jasmine creeper trailing along the ground. It was a climbing plant, but it had nothing to climb. And so, with a tenderness that the Tamils never forgot, Pari unhitched his royal chariot and left it there, for the small flowering vine to rest and climb upon.

Think how strange and lovely that is. A king's chariot, given away to a weed in flower. The poet Kapilar, who loved Pari, sang his praises for years. And when the three crowned kings together could not take Pari's hill-fort by force, the story goes that they brought him down only by trickery. A man so generous, it seems, could be beaten but never simply outmatched.

The others shine in the same light. was the patron of , the beloved woman poet, who served him not only as singer but as trusted envoy. Ay, Pegan, Ori, Kari, and Nalli became, each one, a byword for giving. Through the seven, the Tamil land taught its children a clear and demanding lesson: a person is measured not by what they keep, but by what they are willing to let go.

Pari gave his chariot to a flower that needed it more than he did. Giving costs us something real, and the Tamils thought that cost was exactly what made it noble. When have you given something away and found you were the richer for it?